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Ilse Aigner, Germany's minister of food, agriculture and consumer protection, who usually concentrates on issues over rotten meat, genetically engineered corn and imitation cheese, recently took on a different kind of issue: the Internet and data privacy. Suddenly Aigner finds herself facing online giants Amazon, Facebook and, above all, Google. Soon Google plans to send cars equipped with cameras out onto Germany's roads once again for the company's Street View project. Aigner is now insisting that Google should ask permission before violating the privacy of German citizens. The minister's attack and the following discussions reveal just how divided the German government is when it comes to the online world. The debate revolves around questions of national security and individual self-determination on the Internet. But it also concerns the power of the large giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and MySpace, as well as the question of what these companies are doing with the records of our everyday data, and how they will be able to obtain information from us, influence us or perhaps even control us in the future. It seem like, once again, a German politician is exploiting the popular issue of internet privacy and censorship in a superficial way in the hope of scoring political points.

Is this war? It looks trivial, sounds personal but at heart this is 2 key multinational corporations fighting for the domination of markets that may well define us culturally, socially, economically and eventually politically. Google's overt entry into the hardware domain merely underlines the scary power we know they have.

Developers are not thrilled with Apple's new rules. The restrictions imposed affect the work of developers like Jack Freeman, who here declares himself as a "former loyal developer"

This article discusses President Obama's views on the iPad, iPhone, Xboxs etc as sources of entertainment, rather than a tool for empowerment. Though i have to find it somewhat ironic, as these platforms could offer new methods of campaigning for his next election!

The popularity of ipad has raised book piracy issue. Since dowloading books is relatively fast than downloading a movie or a song, publishers are seriously facing a problem of online piracy.